Wallet and Other Progress

Here's an in-progress shot of the wallet I'm working on. It's ready to have the pockets sewn in at this point.

My original plan was to make it out of havana-colored harness leather, like the lower pocket. Harness leather that is much thicker than you'd ever consider for a wallet. Now, just before I started working on the wallet, we'd split some dark red-brown harness leather down for a pouch. We got the small pocket split down. But we couldn't get the larger pieces to split. Ron checked the adjustment of the splitter blade, tried again, took the blade out, honed it, I made sure the feed rollers we cleaned, re-assembled and re-adjusted and . . . no good. A wide piece of that particular leather just wasn't going to go, so plan B was different leather that was already the appropriate thickness.

Scratch "appropriate thickness" and make it the thickness called for in the pattern. It's really really thin. This won't be a wallet you'd carry around in your back pocket all the time (which Ron could use, his old one is starting to fall apart), this is one a gentleman would carry around in his lapel pocket. Version two will probably be thicker. And Ron suggests making one to the original pattern size, which is significantly bigger.

All the messing about with the splitter meant that the pouch fronts didn't get waxed after all. Oh well.